10/30/09

Another day with an early wakeup call would certainly be another day destined for frustration, right? Eh, not really. Maybe my hypothesis needs a little tweaking. I got up at 7:30am and headed over to make my delivery. After sitting in the consignee's waiting room for a half hour after I was empty, waiting for my paperwork, I walked back out to my truck and found a few messages waiting. The first was the 'report to dispatch' note that they send whenever my turn comes around. The other two were a plan summary and a request for me to update my available hours. Apparently, when I didn't report to dispatch as requested, the fella took the liberty of choosing a load on my behalf.

As I noted earlier, sometimes I guess it ain't so bad to be awake in the morning. The load that I was given was a nice 2,033 mile job to New York. Technically speaking, I was already on the board last night and the New York load didn't have to leave immediately, so my hypothesis may still have some merit. I could have been sleeping when the satellite messages came through. Given the lengthy time spent at the consignee though, it was helpful to have put that delivery behind me before getting started on the next one.

I was on my way back to the terminal when the dispatcher called to make sure that my available hours would be enough to reach the consignee by Tuesday morning. He said that it looked like I should be fine. I concurred. I stopped by the dispatch window to grab my paperwork as I returned to the terminal. The dispatcher pulled out the envelope and did his obligatory review to make sure everything was right. As he handed me the bills, he sighed and told me to take a look at the weight. Great, I thought. Another freaking heavy one to drag through the hills into New York. My last several loads, with the exception of that 70 miler in Texas, have been wicked heavy. I rolled my eyes and took a look, then had to chuckle. Okay, ya got me dude. 837 pounds. The archivist at the Fenian Godfather Institute is a lazy SOB so we can't provide independent confirmation, but this is most likely the longest distance that I've ever pulled a load of less than 1,000 pounds. That'll certainly help ease the workload on my tired old truck.

In order to reach my destination by Tuesday morning, I'm going to use just about all of my available hours under the 70 hour rule between now and Monday. It remains to be seen whether or not I stop at one of the Corleone family's estates tomorrow. With my Irish playing a 7:30pm home game in San Antonio, I could certainly knock out a full day of driving and still have time to settle in before the game. I'm just not sure if I'll feel like dropping the cash to spend a few hours and then hit the road again in the morning. I don't know. We'll play it by ear. Der Führer doesn't seem to be too excited about the game in either case.



Today's portion of the drive brought me back out of Laredo on US-59 and up toward Houston. Seeing that I would be hitting the big city right around 5pm, I decided to stop in George West for some dinner and a long break to let the traffic chill out a little. I like stopping in George West for two reasons. First is that they have a SubWay at one of the little truck stops on the east side of town. I may not have mentioned it before, but I'm quite fond of a sandwich called the Italian BMT with double meat. The second reason is that I can't help but appreciate a town that decided to name itself after a backup wide receiver for Notre Dame.

After my break there, I got back on the road and cruised on through Houston. It was US-59 as opposed to I-35, Friday as opposed to Tuesday, and evening as opposed to afternoon, but... I win again suckers!


This backup on the south edge of town was only a couple of miles long but I was still glad to be on the other side of the road. My side got a little congested once I got downtown but overall the timing of the break in George West seemed to pay off. I stopped off at the big truck stop in Shepherd and found plenty of open parking spaces, so that was that for today. Tomorrow... probably waking before 10am again. Damn.